The Art of the Engine Driver by Steven Carroll

Author:Steven Carroll
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

The art of locomotive engine driving can only be acquired after years of study, patient practice and experience.

Bagley’s Australian Locomotive Engine Drivers’

Guide

Somewhere out there they are making fire. A man, his face smudged black from dust and cinders, is standing legs astride the footplate to steady himself at high speed and he is carrying coals, broken into small pieces for even burning, from the tender to the furnace. The door of the furnace will be open and its glow will light the cabin, and the coals will fall gold and vermilion from the shovel into the furnace to make fire. And from the fire will come steam, and from the steam will come power. What is a locomotive engine? this man will, like all firemen, be asked at his driver’s examination. Vic poses the question to himself as he listens to the train cross the trestle bridge and answers as he did years before. And the answer comes as automatically now as it did then. What is a locomotive engine? A steam engine placed on wheels capable of producing motive power to propel itself and draw carriages on a railway. And that is what the man with the shovel in his hand is doing when he makes fire. He is creating motive power, somewhere out there in the thistle country to the north of the suburb where the trestle bridge spans a wide, ancient river valley.

To stand on the footplate with Paddy Ryan was to stand in the studio of a great artist, for Paddy Ryan was acknowledged as the Michelangelo of engine drivers.

The engine cabin was his classroom. And whatever engine they drove, it was always the same; a furnace fired in just the right way, the smell of steam, burning coal and freshly brewed tea, and all the instruments and gauges cleaned and polished well before the drive. In this way both fire and instruments glowed, night or day, winter or summer, and Paddy’s cabins always had the stamp of a master. Work was never work, nothing was ever ordinary, and the seven years that Vic spent learning the trade as Paddy’s fireman always felt like a privilege. Even the impromptu lessons he conducted, in question and answer, remained as vivid as when they were spoken.

The drivers’ classes at the Institute told him all he could learn from books and diagrams, but it was Paddy Ryan who took him over the steam engine, piece by piece, as if it were his own private invention. Paddy who taught him the importance of a clean cabin in which to work. And it was Paddy who taught the twenty-year-old Vic all he would ever need to know about the Westinghouse brake, the pistons and the boiler, who broke it all down into its constituent parts in so clear and simple a way as to ensure that Vic knew their mechanics better than he knew the workings of his own heart, lungs and legs. It was Paddy who taught Vic how to

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